Not about soup, but in it

Neofascists

The One Law for All campaign is run by seasoned political activists. That makes their inability to comprehend the question of amicability to neofascists, EDL supporters/sympathizers all the harder to understand.

Reminds me of the old adage “When in a hole, stop digging.”.

I will comment on it later on but in the interim I have taken the liberty of reposting Anne Marie Waters’ statement on the issue, lest it vanish:

“Anne Marie Waters October 8, 2013 at 10:44 pm:

Ok, before I start, I speak on my own behalf, not Maryam’s, or One Law for All, but I simply cannot let this go on without speaking out.

First of all, Pat Condell. Pat Condell is not a racist – he has been very clear on numerous occasions that his issue is with religion, not race. I second that. There are disturbing rape statistics in Scandinavia. This report from Norway discusses it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWWrpv-pbuc The girl interviewed tell us that her rapist told her that he could do whatever he liked to her because his religion says so. You will probably now call the Norwegian police racist, but I doubt that they are. The police woman in question was right that attitudes to women are relevant and we’ve got to have the courage to discuss them. These attitudes stem from religion, not race. BobFromBrockley you wrote: “It’s the language that is racist, not whatever factual basis may or may not exist for his claims”. So you’re unconcerned about the facts? Telling the truth is racist? I’m afraid not. What is racist though is raping Norwegian women because they are Norwegian. Raping “Aussie pigs” because they’re Aussies, is also racist http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/13/1026185124700.html

At no point did Condell blame this on race, but on religion. And perhaps he’s got some reason to given the words of the rapists themselves. The idea that women are to blame for rape is not some lunatic fringe, but state policy in many Islamic states. Sorry if that is inconvenient but the truth often is. You are no doubt going to focus on who did the reporting of these words, and ignore the words, but that is something I can never do. Even the Daily Mail doesn’t get away with fabricating facts.

To suggest (and nobody is) that all Muslim men view women in this way is absurd and grossly offensive, but it is just as absurd to suggest that religious and cultural norms which imprison women for being rape victims has no impact whatsoever on the views of some of these men – especially when they believe that this comes from God. This cannot carry on. We owe it to the victims to be honest about this. And before you say it, no decent person is going to blame all Muslims, or all “immigrants”.. only people such as yourselves lump people in to groups like this. Most people don’t. But the motive matters and it must be addressed.

You might think facing the truth is “stirring up hatred” but I rather think it might be the rapes that are doing that. If the truth hurts, it is the truth that must change, not the fact that people are telling it.

Please try to understand the damage that this causes. Shouting racist at people for recognising reality is the reason that there are 1000s of girls in this country having their genitals butchered every year, are forced in to “marriages”, forced out of school and imprisoned in their homes. Police and social workers are terrified because people like you shout racist at them at every given opportunity – whether what they say is true or not. This is obscene and those who do it need to have a serious look at themselves.

In summary: standing back and doing nothing to protect young girls and women because of their skin colour – that is racism.

You have also demeaned the word racist and made it so that it is no longer taken as seriously as it should, and the result will inevitably be that people who suffer because of their colour of their skin will be ignored. You are having the opposite effect and leaving people to suffer – because of their skin colour, while calling everyone else racists.

SarahAB – I agree with you “there are different shades of opinion amongst EDL supporters”. Yes there are. I don’t like the EDL, I have never supported them and I wish they didn’t exist – but they do, and do you know why? Because people shouted “racist” at everyone who had a legitimate concern about Islam and drove everyone away – creating racial tension, doing nothing to solve anything and instead making it immeasurably worse. Government, police, social workers all ignored it – because they would be called racists if they did anything. This causes the problems you now complain of – this is why the EDL exists.

As for QueenLareefer, who the hell is anyone to tell her she’s a racist? Do you know her? I didn’t know she was EDL but I would have to get to know her before I make judgements on her – to understand what her reasons are. She’s an individual and deserves to be treated like one. The EDL has seriously nasty people in it yes, but many people turn to it because they feel they’ve got nowhere else to go. Where is she to turn to express herself? To the left? What if she loves her country as she clearly does? That makes her a racist to many on the left, especially if that country happens to be England. She will automatically be dismissed. No political party will entertain anyone who expresses a dislike of Islam and what if she doesn’t subscribe to left-wing beliefs? I know that some of you believe anyone who isn’t left-wing is a racist, but that is your problem. I happen to love this country too, as do many black and Asian Brits – what category do you put them in? What is your view on the nasty elements of the UAF? An organisation which has an avowed Islamist as its vice chair? (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewgilligan/100140248/ken-livingstones-anti-fascist-group-appoints-fascist-as-vice-chair/) Do you condemn the UAF just as loudly? I didn’t think so.

People often feel they have nowhere to go when they dislike Islam, as they perfectly entitled to do. I don’t agree with every word Queen Lareefer says, but amazingly, as an adult, I can still respect her right to express herself without smearing her as a racist. She clearly has issues with Islam: she and I have that in common. I retweeted her today (and you can ‘presume’ all you like about what tweets of hers I saw or didn’t) because I support the view that we should move on and all anti-Islamists reject actual racists and work with Quilliam and others to defeat the real threat of Islamism. Serious kudos are due to Quilliam for this. We’ve got to stop alienating and pushing everyone away, we’ve got to identify racism for what it is – it’s about race, not religion. Opposition to Islamism is not some exclusive club and who the hell do people think they are to think they get to dictate who is or isn’t a racist?

“Whether culturism is a genuinely new strain of ideological thinking or a cynical euphemism for race remains unclear. However, Britain’s far right have long understood that openly racial language serves to alienate much of their core demographic. Hence, it is no surprise that an ideology that replaces racial preservation with cultural preservation may well be seen as an easier sell. Whether the language of culturism becomes more widely disseminated among Britain’s far right, or whether it proves to be an ideological cul-de-sac, is yet to be seen.

However, as the BFP scramble to jettison their far-right image in advance of their electoral endeavors, the language of culturism could perhaps prove useful in their pursuit of respectability and the ‘silent majority’. Further to this, the EDL’s leader, Tommy Robinson, yesterday resigned as deputy leader of the BFP. The motivation behind his surprise departure remains unclear, but it is possible that with several impending court cases Robinson is attempting to detoxify the BFP/EDL link and put distance between his criminal reputation and Kevin Carrolls attempt to become a Police and Crime Commissioner. Following his surprise departure from the BFP Robinson has indicated that he intends to develop the English Defence League as an independent political party, possibly targeting the 2014 European elections. Where this leaves the fledgling alliance between the BFP and the EDL remains unclear but the consensual belief that the BFP was now the political wing of the EDL is likely no longer the case. “

“Speakers, according to Geller’s blog, will include some of Islamophobia’s most influential and vicious voices. In addition to herself, Geller lists Robert Spencer, a colleague and self-taught “expert” on Islam who is greatly admired by Anders Breivik, the Oslo terrorist who in July 2011 slaughtered 77 people he thought were enabling Muslim immigration into Norway; Steven Lennon and Kev Carrol of the EDL; Anders Gravers of SIOE; and a host of European and Australian Islamophobes whose names are less well-known in America. Noteworthy among them is Richard Abrahamsson (also known as Richard Abrams), a leader in the Swedish Defence League (SDL) who, according to Islamophobia Watch, has blogged about a plan to “reclaim the Swastika,” writing, “If you want US to respect OTHER cultures, you must also respect OUR culture and its symbols.”

Abrams’ website is for the most part macabre and disturbing: among weird occultic images we find statements such as “I will be remembered as the one who beheaded presidents in righteous wrath”. He is also a musician, sometimes using the fuller name “Richard Isak Abrams”. According to a blurb for his band on LastFM:

Iblis Industries (or 1blis 1ndustries) is a Swedish project created in 2005 by Richard Abrams (also in Sitra Ahra and Hypothermia.)

The music released so far consists of a variey of elements such as; Neoclassical, Downtempo, Black metal, Industrial and Noisestep.

The themes of Iblis Industries is mainly cultivated in a search for the divine embers.

Of course, a provocative interest in the grotesque and and the dark is par for the course with this kind of music, and it is unclear how far one can extrapolate from stage persona to political identification. However, for an organisation seeking wider credibility, the impression given by Abrams’ site is unattractive. And given the links between the self-described “Counter-Jihad Movement” and elements of the Christian Right, such an association is likely to be awkward.

” [My emphasis]

Having looked at Richard Abrams’ site I can confirm that he has serious hangups with the swastika.

Update 4: This is a bunch of EDL members and supporters who were very keen on the swastika so much so they had it tattooed on their chests, watch them giving the Nazi salute:

It is often said that politics makes strange bedfellows, but it really doesn’t sink in until you have seen the white supremacist, David Duke, expressing his support for Charles Barron, an Afro-American.

Barron is not unsurprisingly a vocal “anti-Zionist” and in Duke’s mind hatred of Jews trumps his own profound dislike of Afro-Americans, as the ADL reminds us:

“Perhaps America’s most well-known racist, David Duke was instrumental in the Klan resurgence of the 1970s. He pioneered the now common effort on the far right to camouflage racist ideas in hot-button issues like affirmative action and immigration, successfully appealing to race and class resentments.

Similarly, he was one of the first neo-Nazi and Klan leaders to discontinue the use of Nazi and Klan regalia and ritual, as well as other traditional displays of race hatred, and to cultivate media attention. “

“Former KKK Grand Wizard and member of the Louisiana Legislature David Duke released a video yesterday endorsing Charles Barron in his race for Brooklyn’s 8th Congressional district against Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries. Mr. Barron, a member of the City Council and former member of the Black Panther Party who, over the years, has made a series of controversial statements against Israel and in support of African dictators Muammar Qaddafi.

He would seem to be an odd choice for a self-described “white nationalist” like Mr. Duke, but in the video, Mr. Duke explains that he thinks Mr. Jeffries has “sold his soul to the international Zio-bankers” while Mr. Barron’s strong past criticisms of Israel outweigh their other differences. ” [My emphasis.]

So for one time neo-Nazi, Duke, his loathing of Jews is paramount, meaning he’ll support almost anyone if they echo his sentiment in that area, even an “anti-Zionist”.

Greece, Hungary, Germany, etc are not the only countries who have a problem with the Far Right.

According to projections from Le Monde the National Front in France could obtain about 15% of seats.

In certain areas French neofascists have nearly taken half of the available vote, Reuters explains:

“(Reuters) – French far-right leader Marine Le Pen took a commanding lead in the first round of a legislative election on Sunday, raising the prospect of a seat in parliament for her anti-immigrant party as her arch-foe, firebrand leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon, bowed out.

National Front leader Le Pen won more than 42 percent of the vote in a working class town in northern France where she has established a base, tapping into unease over high unemployment and years of economic decline.

Before official results were announced, Le Pen said the result in Henin-Beaumont showed that her party remained a powerful political force in France after she placed third in a presidential election last May. “

“With just days to go before the kick-off of the Euro 2012 championships, Panorama reveals shocking new evidence of racist violence and anti-semitism at the heart of Polish and Ukrainian football and asks whether tournament organiser UEFA should have chosen both nations to host the prestigious event.

Reporter Chris Rogers witnesses a group of Asian fans being attacked on the terraces of a Ukrainian premier league match and hears anti-Semitic chanting at games in Poland. And with exclusive access to a far right group in Ukraine which recruits and trains football hooligans to attack foreigners, Panorama asks: how safe will travelling football teams and their supporters be at this summer’s European festival of football? “

It is available on the BBC Iplayer and will be rebroadcast on Thu 31 May 2012, 04:30 – BBC News Channel, Fri 1 Jun 2012, 01:35 – BBC One and Sun 3 Jun 2012, 20:30 – BBC News Channel.

We should never forget that those ideas and sentiments that lead to mass murder during WW2 are still very much with us:

“VIENNA (AP) — Austrians gathered in memory of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis condemned plans to hold a ball of extreme rightists later in the day Friday, saying the event’s timing transformed it into a macabre dance on Holocaust victims’ graves.

Friday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, celebrated each year on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Ball organizers insisted the fact that their event coincided this year with the 67th anniversary of the death camp’s demise was coincidental and denied suggestions that those attending were extremists.

But opponents vehemently criticized both the day chosen to hold the WKR ball and the political views of those attending it, suggesting it regularly attracts elements from the neo-Nazi fringe. The ball is to be held in Vienna’s ornate Hofburg palace, less than a minute’s walk away from the memorial event.

The dispute reflects both the distance Austria has come in acknowledging its role in Nazi atrocities and stubborn rightist sentiment among some here, who see themselves as Germans and Germans as the superior race — a common regional building block of anti-Semitism.

Some of the most bitter comments came from the crowd that converged on Vienna’s Heldenplatz, or Heroes’ Square, to lay wreaths for the victims of the Holocaust.

“You, who will dance and celebrate here; we remind you of the murder of two-thirds of Europe’s Jews,” proclaimed death camp survivor Rudolf Gelbard. Insisting that Nazi atrocities must never be forgotten, Greens’ Party head Eva Glawischnig declared, “It is all the greater perfidy that there will be dancing today on the graves of Auschwitz.” “

Whilst browsing the web I came across these two pieces from Christopher Hitchens. I think they aptly illustrate the difficulties Hichens has in dealing with David Irving.

In the first article from The Nation in October 1994, Hichens counterpoises Irving with Robert Faurisson, seemingly trying to sanitise the former by comparison to the malignant latter. Readers will remember that Faurisson is a well-known Holocaust denier and a recipient of Noam Chomsky’s support.

The second defence from the Wall Street Journal in February 2006, where Irving is characterised as merely an “eccentric Englishman”, not the propagandising neo-fascist that he really is, turns out to be even less satisfactory than the 1994 judgement.

Hitchens’ lingering defence is that, supposedly, Irving “is in fact not a “denier,” but a revisionist, and much-hated by the full-dress “denial” faction. “

Such sentiments indicate Hitchens’ naïveté, infatuation and inability to give up on his old eating companion. He is reduced to picking up Irving’s scraps, arguing that the benefit of Irving’s “research” far outweigh any negatives which is an intellectually idiotic conclusion and indicative of his shallow grasp of the issues.

I leave the articles here as a matter of public record:

Minority Report by Christopher Hitchens, The Nation, 3rd October 1994.

“R. D. Laing once wrote an essay titled “The Obvious.” The idea was suggested to him by an opinion-poll finding in the 1960s that appeared to show that millions of Americans were not aware that mainland China had a Communist government. Laing wondered aloud what one can take for granted by way of shared assumptions—not just on the part of others but of oneself. George Orwell once contrived a similar exercise, trying to imagine what he would say to prove the earth was spherical if confronted by a convinced Flat Earther. These mental challenges are useful for their own sake.

So when Professor Faurisson came through Washington to visit the Holocaust Museum, I hastened along to meet him. Probably no fact is more agreed-upon than the scope and magnitude of the Final Solution, and it’s necessary as well as interesting to hold converse with those who maintain that the whole story is a fable. Faurisson presents himself in a brisk, rationalist and Cartesian style: It is widely alleged that gas chambers—”chemical slaughterhouses”—were used to destroy European Jewry. Very well, were is there a surviving authentic model, or photograph, or diagram of the operation of one such?

My own first answer must be that I have never seen a relic of an operating gas chamber (though I have seen small-scale crematoria in camp museums in Germany). Have I studied the feasibility of asphyxiation en masse, on the scale claimed? Do I appreciate the immense difficulty, supposing the task to possible in the first place, of removing heaps of cyanide-poisoned corpses from the alleged chamber? My answers must be, again, no and no. Eh bien, we are getting somewhere. Have I understood that much anti-Nazi propaganda is just that? That there was no soap made from human fat? That the confessions of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, was extorted by coercion and in any case mentioned a total of deaths at Auschwitz that not even the Israeli experts at Yad Vashem credit? Here, my answers are yes and yes, because I know that the story in the first case, and Höss in the second, have been debunked. So, am I not ready to sign myself among the brave and persecuted, who deny the myth of the Six Million? Not at least until I can try a syllogism of my own, on a professor who evidently relishes the Socratic method.

Is it not true that the National Socialist Party’s propaganda specifically and openly cited Jews as the root of all rot and evil? Is it not the case that, before the world and before the war, Jewish persons and property were violated and vandalized in Germany? Further, once the war had begun, were the Jews of Western Europe not shipped eastward against their will? Suppose me to be credulous about “gas-chamber pornography”; if these people were not put to death, why did so few of them return?
There is something—I scarcely know what to call it—something distant about Faurisson’s response. He does not consent, as I did with his questions, to answer mine cumulatively and in order. He remains polite and he continues to discuss, but he has become bored—that’s it, bored.

I have read the debate between Faurisson and David Irving that took place under the auspices of the “Holocaust revionist” Institute for Historical Review at a conference in October 1992. Irving is infamous for his claim that no proof of a Führer-order exists, and that if there were any mass killings of Jews, they were unauthorized by the Nazi emperor. In that debate he announces that he is an anti-Semite. When Adolf Eichmann, for example, spoke of a Final Solution:

It was quite plain to him that is was only a plan to sweep all the Jews of Europe aboard boats and transport them lock, stock and barrel down to Madagascar, where they would be on an island where they couldn’t bother any of their neighbors and where none of their neighbors could bother them. I’ve always said and I say it here again—even though I risk making a few enemies—that I think that it would have been an ideal solution to a perennial world tragedy.

Irving also concedes that there were, indeed, mass murders of Jews on the eastern front, most common by firing squads. He takes very seriously the testimony of Gen. Walter Bruns, who described a massacre he witnessed near Riga as early as November 1941. And he credits other testimony as well—doubtless with regret, since such unpleasantness makes the Madagascar option look positively humane.

Faurisson disagrees with Irving about both the occurrence of the massacres and the responsibility for such deaths as did occur. This he attributes, in our discussion, to the inevitable side-effects of war. He is contemptuous of Irving as a historian and, oddly for a man with such insistence on detail, has no memory of Irving’s Madagascar statement. He insists that he himself is guided in his quest by no prejudice and no ulterior motive, merely an imperative to pursue objectives and verifiable truth.

One of his fellow revisionists sat at the same table to observe our discussion and broke in (obviously to be helpful, as he thought) to say: “Of course, we all agree that the deportation of the Jews was a very great crime. I know Robert agrees, don’t you Robert?”
“No,” replies Faurisson, “I do not.” He explains that the Nazi responsibility in the Second World War is no graver than that of many parties and regimes in modern and ancient history. So, I ask him finally, You think there was nothing unique in the Nazi system? “Nothing morally unique, no.”
Both Faurisson and Irving have been subjected to a lot of stupid censorship and harassment for their writings, and it has been known for persecution to distort judgment. Some overt neo-Nazis deny the Holocaust while openly wishing that there had been a Final Solution, or will be one soon. Faurisson, I judge, is not of this company. He just doesn’t think that Nazism was such a big deal to begin with.”

“It is best not to mince words. The imprisonment of David Irving by the Austrian authorities is a disgrace. It is a state punishment for a crime — that of expression and argument and publication — that is not a legal offense in Mr. Irving’s country of birth and that could not be an offense under the First Amendment. It is to be hoped, by all those who value the right to dissent, that his appeal against both sentence and conviction will be successful.

Strictly speaking, “context” ought not to weigh in the scale when the question of unfettered expression is being decided. And obviously, the provincial police of Styria were only doing their statutory job when they detained Mr. Irving under the terms of a very broadly drawn Austrian law that criminalizes even “gross understatement” (however that might be phrased) of the Nazi campaign against European Jewry. But it is somehow unfortunate that a small European country with a very bad record from the Nazi period should be jailing an eccentric Englishman at the precise moment when a small European country with a much better record is the object of an orchestrated campaign of lies, blackmail and violence. Those who jump for joy when the embassies of European democracies are immolated in the capital cities of squalid dictatorships have decided to announce their own game of moral equivalence. What of your precious free speech, they say, when the Holocaust is immune from criticism on your own soil? Austrian bureaucracy — never at its best with this thorny question: how embarrassing that the prison library contained several Irving hardbacks — could almost have set out to try and prove the Islamist demagogues’ “point.”

I put “point” in quotes because there obviously is no such moral equivalence. Anyone should have the right to criticize or even insult and lampoon religious belief, just as anyone should have the right to try to revise or rewrite history. But the Muslim thugs are as stupid as they look, because they only assert the second right in order to obliterate the first one. They are not even trying for a trade-off (unless you think that freedom for European brownshirts would lead to the reopening of desecrated synagogues and churches in the Arab world, in which case you will lose your shirt whatever color it happens to be). But the bullies do accidentally make the point that counts to begin with: The defense of free expression is indivisible. Compared to that important principle, nothing is “sacred,” or even close to it. Perhaps you notice that, of late, the word “sacred” has become an easy anagram of “scared”?

Now may I mince a word or two? I have been writing in defense of Mr. Irving for several years. When St. Martin’s Press canceled its contract to print his edition of the Goebbels diaries, which it did out of fear of reprisal, I complained loudly and was rewarded by an honest statement from the relevant editor — Thomas Mallon — that his decision had been a “profile in prudence.” I will not take refuge in the claim that I was only defending Mr. Irving’s right to free speech. I was also defending his right to free inquiry. You may have to spend time on some grim and Gothic Web sites to find this out, but he is in fact not a “denier,” but a revisionist, and much-hated by the full-dress “denial” faction. The pages on Goebbels, as in his books on Dresden, Churchill and Hitler, contain some highly important and damning findings from his work in the archives of the Third Reich. (The Goebbels book contains final proof that the Nazis financed Sir Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts in England: a claim that Mosley’s many sympathizers have long denied.)

Compared to this useful evidence, the fact that Mr. Irving was once a Mosley supporter is unimportant to me…. “

If any reminder was needed on what type of people inhabit the fringes in the BNP then Hope not hate has it:

“Fifty seven hard line racists gathered in Preston last weekend to commemorate the life of John Tyndall, the Nazi uniform wearing founder of the British National Party.

It was the sixth time that a collection of Nazis and Anti-Semites no longer welcomed or favoured in Nick Griffin’s new version of the party, have gathered to remember their mentor.

Tyndall was the eloquent writer of such immortal lines as “the Jew is like a maggot feeding off the corpse of the write race”. He died in 2005 while facing charges of behaviour likely to incite racial hatred, surprisingly. “

Rev. Stephen Sizer is no novice in terms of racism. Engage 2006: The Church is Moral; The People in the Shadows Are Not My coverage, going back years. The CST on Sizer. Betsy Childs’ excellent The Master of Apologies. Advertisements

Previously, I have pointed out how the Stop the War Coalition uses material from an active antisemite, Alison Weir (not the historian). Also, they published a poem, which willingly referenced Gordon Duff, the proprietor of a hardcore antsemitic site, Veterans… Continue reading →

This is what passes for comment amongst some ‘Jews for Justice for Palestinians’ supporters, taken as a public record: “God Promised Antisemitism to the Zionists My reflections on the Campaign Against Antisemitism survey, by Aaron Dover [Picture] In order to… Continue reading →

My old political sparring partner, Bob from Brockley, has wide intellectual tastes, from anarchism to extraordinary musical endeavours and beyond. But above all he is very charitable. He takes an interest in what ex-Socialist Workers Party members think and say.… Continue reading →

As a matter of public record this is a poem published by the British Stop the War Coalition. Astute readers will notice that it approvingly quotes from a neo-Nazi, Gordon Duff. “JOAN RIVERS died in an endoscopy clinic Where she… Continue reading →

Most literate adults (or at least those with access to the Internet) would probably know to avoid the opinions of David Duke. Duke, ex-Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, convicted fraudster and semiprofessional antisemite is hardly… Continue reading →

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East Editor recently stated: @Jinjirrie sorry didn't get to this. BDS is going from the edge of the debate closer to the centre — Jeremy Bowen (@BowenBBC) April 25, 2014 I feel there are many… Continue reading →

The premier antiwar movement in Britain, the Stop the War Coalition, are in a bit of a bind. They owe their existence to campaigning against the invasion of Iraq. They actively campaign on the Middle East and Afghanistan. Yet for… Continue reading →

The level of ambivalence found in the West towards the mass death of Syrian civilians is truly grotesque. In March 2014 it will be the three year anniversary of the conflict, which started with peaceful protests and continues with the… Continue reading →

There is a new report covering the phenomenon of Islamophobia and social media. It comes from the superb Online Hate Prevention Institute and leading scholar in the field, Dr Andre Oboler. “On International Human Rights Day, December 10th 2013, the… Continue reading →